IT’s Moment: A Technology-First Solution for Uncertain Times

Build an adaptive roadmap that IT can use to lead the charge in proactively identifying ways to neutralize risk for the organization while leveraging technology enabled opportunities.

• Phase 1 – Assess Uncertainties & Opportunities
• Phase 2 – Review Budget, Staffing, & Contracts
• Phase 3 – Build Your Technology-First Action Plan
• Phase 4 – Get Ready to Execute!

Start by assessing the impact of global uncertainty on your organization. Develop and communicate mitigation options based on likelihood and immediate impact. Counter the global uncertainty with a technology-first action plan.

1. Defuse Uncertainty Drivers: Perform a Global Uncertainty Impact Assessment to quantify your exposure and identify opportunities for the entire organization, not just IT.
2. Lean Into the Curve: Review Exponential IT principles along the most recent technology advancement curve and leverage insights for technology road-mapping and communications.
3. Pick Your First Bets: Do a rapid technology landscape scan and identify your top 1-3 technology-first use cases prioritized by organizational impact.
4. Claim Your New Mandate: Align your vision of a technology-first organization with the CEO and then the C-suite quickly. Ask the CEO to evangelize it with your board.
5. Get the Word Out: Write and communicate a first version of a technology-first action plan for the organization on how technology will drive organizational growth and resilience to counter uncertainty.

Build a significant cost reduction plan to free up budget, people, and resources. Overshoot any cost-cutting mandates and use the overage to fund innovation.

1. Don’t Bet the Farm: Start by defining your cost cutting principles and setting your total innovation-to-operations spend ratio and appetite.
2. Find Real Dollars Quickly: Build a cost reduction plan that is focused on OpEx rather than CapEx and achieves significant impact rapidly. Cancel or defer noncritical projects. Assign clear ownership and oversight to enable overshooting.
3. Demonstrate Technology Impact: Adopt a best-in-class ITFM taxonomy that enables significantly more granular spend cut by different lenses. Benchmark respective spend against industry peers and identify additional cost cutting ratios. Enable linkage between technology impact and business outcomes to gain ongoing support for your Technology-First Roadmap.
4. Shorten the Cycles: Build capabilities to drive shorter IT strategy and budget planning cycles. Set spend targets in alignment with the CFO.
5. Sharpen the Pencil: Renegotiate vendor contracts leveraging negotiation best practices and price and discount benchmarking to save costs.

Don’t let uncertainty derail your path to systematically pursue IT excellence. Focus on the capabilities proven to have the highest impact and leverage your team to execute.

1. Get the Baseline: Run diagnostics on core capabilities to measure your maturity across all domains and prioritize accordingly.
2. Focus on What Really Matters: Adopt a playbook to systematically achieve IT excellence.
3. You Can’t Do IT Alone: For each of your key roles, use playbooks to delegate authority and responsibility to your team.
4. Enable Everyone: Give your team members the resources, knowledge, and training they need to succeed.
5. Aim High Selectively: Embrace Exponential IT principles to leapfrog current IT capabilities through successful execution of a few focused use cases.

Global uncertainty is putting pressure on the workforce. As traditional skill procurement sources change, you need to prioritize retaining knowledge and developing in-demand skills from within.

1. Knowledge Is Power: Understand the critical sources of knowledge in your organization and preserve it through targeted talent management and documentation. Provide accessible knowledge assets to the organization, especially with regard to driving AI transformation.
2. Drive Adaptability: Become an adaptive IT leader. Assess and build adaptability in your workforce as it becomes the most important skill going forward.
3. Lead the Pack: Deploy capabilities and workflow autonomization aggressively. Gradually delegate decision-making rights to AI agents to demonstrate the impact of agentic AI.
4. Fill Your Gaps: Develop critical AI, cybersecurity, and adaptive leadership capabilities.
5. Win the Race for Talent: Focus on rapid onboarding over fear of attrition. Increase the skill bar when recruiting – and pay more for real talent (“10x employee”).

Agentic AI is here. Pivot from long-term transformation roadmaps to certain ROI delivery today, mostly leveraging vendor capabilities. Use freed-up funds to drive organizational outcomes.

1. Just Do It: Identify the highest impact AI use cases immediately leveraging Info-Tech’s AI Marketplace. Rapidly align with business leaders. Fast-track vendor negotiations and deliver the AI use case within weeks, not months.
2. Stop Saying No: Build sandbox environments. Give AI tools to as many employees as humanly possible. Embrace bottom-up innovation. Focus AI governance walls on production and customer data, not early pilots.
3. Spend, Spend, Spend: Fund innovation using cost-cutting overshoot. Spend on foundational capabilities (e.g. data and related access), build sandbox environments and buy AI tools for the entire organization. Fund the use cases with the quickest time-to-value, ideally with co-funding and sponsorship from business units.
4. Have ONE Strategy: Your AI strategy is your IT strategy and your enterprise strategy. In technology-first organizations, all of those must converge quickly. Focus on rapid use case assessment and execution. Prove IT impact through co-owned organizational outcomes. Start with certain-to-complete projects over certain-to-ROI projects.
5. If in Doubt, Buy Over Build: Focus on vendor offerings with immediate impact. Use a rapid application selection framework (RASF) for AI solutions. Ensure value with project assurance.

Constant change means no time to slow down. Create mechanisms to successfully implement your action plan. Monitor the progress of your initiatives and adapt rapidly and in real time.

1. Aim for Impact: Have your team monitor bottom-up innovation pilots across the entire organization. Have a fast process to vet and prioritize pilots and dedicate IT resources quickly to push them into production.
2. Measure What’s Real and Fund What Works: Revisit initial assumptions frequently. Fund based on outcomes.
3. Let Things Go: Kill failing projects quickly. Make it blame-free and not about the people. “We tried, it didn’t work, move on.”
4. Shatter the Org Chart: Match talent to impact and certainty for delivery rather than original assumptions, organizational alignment, institutional knowledge, or personal preferences.
5. It’s Not Bragging If It’s True: Communicate wins and failures monthly to break down silos and waterfall thinking. Delegate ongoing communication to lead the organization, not just IT.

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